Pragmatism and Principle

If you need further convincing that Mitt Romney is just another in the long line of managerial progressives and in principle find nothing truly wrong with Obamacare, then this post by Paul Rahe is for you.  Please read the whole thing, but here is the take-away paragraph:

Mitt Romney knows next to nothing about the principles underpinning American government, and it has never crossed his mind that we cannot sustain political and personal liberty in the United States if we embrace the economic bill of rights proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944 and blur the distinction between public revenues that our elected representatives can rightly spend within the limits specified by the Constitution pretty much as they see fit, on the one hand, and the property that remains our own, on the other. In politics, the prospective Republican nominee operates on the same set of premises as Barack Obama. Both men presume that the property we hold is really public property – to be spent as the legislative power directs. Both take it for granted that it is the job of government to guarantee healthcare to everyone. Both are perfectly happy to take from the industrious and rational to support the greedy and improvident. If they disagree, it is only about the most efficient way to deliver the goods.

In reading this piece, I picked up on something that I've been forgetting to mention:  In the midst of his pseudo-Tenth Amendment defense of Romneycare, Romney maintains that the states should serve as laboratories for democracy, a cliche that has been included in many forgettable political speeches (and which is supposed to signal some high respect for the principles of federalism on the part of the speaker).  But who first coined that line?

It was written by progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissent in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932). Brandeis, who was nominated to the Court by President Woodrow in 1916, was a progressive who had great influence on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who famously discounted any idea of universal truth outside the positive law) and "favored federalist 'experimentation in things social and economic' as a means to progressive, statist ends."

Romney's reliance on Bradeis's dictum--albeit unknowingly I'm sure--is an interesting irony that tells us something important about Romney and the political philosophy to which he and most of the Republican presidents of the 20th century subscribe.